I just finished submitting Giant Robots of Tunguska for print publication. It should be showing up on Amazon in the next day or two. As usual, the paperback will be $9.99 and feature the cover art of Carlos Balarezo.

When Vic’s cousin appears on Doc’s doorstep, it’s not long before the team is plunged into an adventure that will take them half way around the world on a mission of life and death.
Vic’s reaction to a strange alien mineral has made her the strongest being on Earth. It’s also killing her. Her only hope lies underneath a Soviet labor camp deep in the Siberian wilderness. Driven by a need she cannot comprehend Vic leads the team into a war zone with the fate of the very planet on the line.
Meanwhile, Doc and the rest have to try and save Vic without sparking a world war.

As more of a writer than a marketer, it can be hard to talk about sales and marketing. I launched Attacked Beneath Antarctica with as much of an advertising blitz as I could afford, and then dropped the price on Against the Eldest Flame to $0.99 as a cheap way to get into the series.

So far it seems to be working. My free promotion on Against the Eldest Flame got almost 300 copies out into the wild, and that’s just the beginning. Freebies are fun, but what matters are sales and paid reads.

That’s where I’m actually seeing the benefits. Against the Eldest Flame is selling steadily; the numbers aren’t huge but they’ve been pretty constant. I’ve also been selling copies of both sequels, with Attacked Beneath Antarctica moving slightly faster than Air Pirates of Krakatoa.

It’s looking good, and now I’m getting ready to publish book 4: Giant Robots of Tunguska.

When I started working on the Doc Vandal series back in November of 2009, the last thing I thought was that I would have to consider current politics. I picked the late 1930’s for a reason, and part of that reason was because good and evil were clearly delineated.

Nazis were bad; punching Nazis was good.

Now it’s almost eight years later and I’m working on a story about the German-American Bund and Nazis are in the news on an almost daily basis. If I was to listen to some people, I’d be expected to give the Nazis the benefit of the doubt under the guise of freedom of speech.

One of the more difficult things about writing a series is keeping track of characters. Few things are worse than describing a character one way in book one, and a completely different way in book four. It’s the same with character backgrounds.

Some writers solve this problem by writing out a detailed character biography as soon as they’re introduced. I can’t work that way. I don’t know the character yet, so I don’t know what shaped them. That doesn’t mean I don’t keep records, it’s that most of those details come from what’s on the page, not something I planned beforehand.

Take Vic for example. When I started the series I had only one hard and fast rule about her romantic life: she was not Doc’s love interest. Everything else was open. At that point, my ideas were for a much more Doc-centric series than I’ve actually ended up writing, but I wanted to keep any potential romance out of the initial core team.

That’s how I was able to write the romance in Air Pirates of Krakatoa. I hadn’t closed anything off, so I was able to follow the characters where the story wanted to take them rather than say it wasn’t happening because of something I’d decided months or years earlier.

Building a character background is always good: but keep your options open.